Postcolonial Identities

‘Post Colonial Identities’ revisits the newer literatures within an expansive African heritage of diverse regional and national groupings.

Editors Smith and Ce have aimed at collating arguments substantiating the cultural uniformity of Africa in terms of literary and cultural movements, and lending some interdisciplinary insights to Africa’s prolific body of literature, as a whole, through the complex course of its twentieth century history.

Recognising the complexity of Black cultures have helped to understand the psychological relationships between Africa and her Diaspora, they insist.

‘Postcolonial Identities’ also studies dialogue and transition in recent oeuvres, noting the preponderance of dialogic art in the manipulation of characters among some distinctive new voices of African fiction.

It interrogates the art of writing and talking back, the Trojan alternatives of traditional post colonial experience, the desolate realities of post colonial heritage in Africa and the existential maturation that might come within an African modernity that seems perennially victimized by the colonial encounter.

An important critical evaluation appears in the ‘eclectic approach’ to new oeuvres which, with the inclusion of hitherto exclusive forms (poetry and fiction) as one whole movement of dialogue, transition and memory, adds an important dimension to understanding some remarkable young voices from Africa.

The counterpoint of this volume comes in the entries which differ in their opinions on the craft two post colonial writers of Indian and African ethnicities, ending with a review of the problems of African modernity in the concept of ‘Black Atlantic’.

Chin Ce, fellow of the Literary Society, Lsi, and author of several books of poetry, essays and prose fiction is editor of the critical writing series on African Literature with Charles Smith, professor of African languages and literature and founder of the society of African folklore.